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How to manage your Statistics

When you first started crunching for BOINC I have no doubt that the information presented to you was a bit overwhelming, and all you wanted to do is to pick a project and start crunching to help out. Later you found out that your machine can crunch more than one project at the same time, or you might have had an opportunity to utilize another computer for crunching as well. It is quite possible at this stage that you thought it is best to keep this other project separate from the first, and gave it a different email address or user name from the first project. Therein lies your first mistake, the one that you didn't even know you were going to make at such an early stage. In order to for us to understand what we should do let us examine just how BOINC operates in this regard.

BOINC and CPID

Every time BOINC contacts one of the projects it checks your Cross project ID number (CPID). This number is a hash of your email address and other identifiable information that identifies you to that project. Your statistics for that project is therefore tied in with your CPID. This CPID is in fact created by the projects themselves at the time you joined the project and your Account was created. Every time something is changed in your Account, you get a new CPID. BOINC compares this CPID with the last one in its data base. If the CPID is changed than BOINC and the project scheduler determine which CPID to use. The BOINC software as such do not correlate and or promulgate Credits earned, this is the function of individual projects. At a predetermined time the project correlates the statitstics and creates an export file that other programs can use to import and collate an overall statitistical data. One such program is BOINCStats. Since this program only collates Stats from individual project exports, newcomers often blame BOINCStats for errors in stats or when you find that your user name appears twice or more times in the stats. More often than not the error is in fact with the user for using different emails or user names in the project.

Keep the same CPID

The way to make sure that your CPID remains the same is to ensure that you sign up using the same email address, User Name and Password for all projects . This way you will keep the same CPID and are assured that your stats are totaled instead of being reported in segments under the same user name. Unfortunately there are times when the project experiences some internal problems, goes off line to fix it and when it come back you are given a different CPID. In this case there is nothing you can do but wait and you will find that in time the CPID's will align. This might take a few days.

How can I change my CPID

If you find your user name appearing more than once in the Stats when you search for your user name it is more than likely your CPID has changed. Go to your individual project, log in to you Account and take a note of your User Name, your email address, your Password and CPID in that project. Now go to another project and check the same details there. Both projects (or more) should read the same. If you find that your user name or email is different than change it to read the same as the first one. If you made changes or even if you found no errors than make sure that you select that project and crunch at least one WU to its completion on each computer that you are running or until the CPID's align. Note that this might take a few days as some projects export lagging details each day and at different times. Check with BOINCStats each day by going to their site as mentioned above, complete the information on user name and password on the top left corner and hit enter. Your user name should only appear once in the resultant check. If the project in question is Offline and is inaccessible than you can not change your CPID in that project and you just have to learn to live with it knowing that it is from a project that is inaccessible.